With UMG main the cost to reshape the music business right into a extra label-friendly type, 2023 could, with hindsight, go down as the 12 months at first modified. No matter lies forward although, new fashions will take time to ship advantages. Music subscriptions are due to this fact going to stay the bedrock of music rightsholder revenues for the foreseeable future. So, it’s a good factor that music subscriptions had such a very good 12 months in 2023.

As of Q3 2023, there have been 713.4 million music subscribers globally, which was 90 million up on the 623.4 million one 12 months earlier in Q3 2022. This issues for 2 causes:

1.     We’re already practically three quarters of the best way to having one billion music subscribers globally. That’s no small achievement. For context, as just lately as 5 years in the past, we had solely simply handed the quarter of a billion subscriber mark

2.     The 90 million subscribers added within the 12 months to Q3 2023 was extra, sure extra(!), than the 83.5 million added one 12 months earlier. In reality, the quantity added was practically as many as these added in 2020. Not dangerous for a maturing class with key markets hitting near-saturation

Nevertheless, there’s a little bit of an issue with wanting on the international market: it’s more and more not a world market, however as a substitute, one in every of two halves: the West and the World South, with every area throwing off dramatically completely different metrics and progress narratives.

Nowhere is that this higher illustrated than out there share rankings:

·      Spotify dominated the worldwide music subscriber base in Q3 2023 with 31.7% market share. Greater than that, it truly elevated its share from 0.4 factors from Q3 2022. So, for all of the flak Spotify has thrown at it, it outgrew the market in 2023. Newer, rising market territories had been central to this progress, but it surely was Spotify’s conventional heartland (North America and Europe) that drove the bulk (59%) of its subscriber progress. Evaluate and distinction this with the all-DSP image, the place North America and Europe drove simply 29% of subscriber progress, with Asia Pacific accounting for practically two thirds of all non-Western subscriber progress

·      China, a market by which solely Apple of the Western DSP operates, underpins this non-Western progress, and the clearest manifestation of that is Tencent Music Leisure (TME). With 102.7 million subscribers in Q3 2023, TME represents 14.4% of all international subscribers, regardless of this being an successfully China-only quantity. NetEase Cloud Music (6.1% share and China-only) and Yandex (3.4% share and Russia-only), additional characterize the dynamic progress from areas the place Western DSPs largely don’t function. That is the brand new, bifurcated nature of the international music subscriber market

·      Apple Music (12.6%), Amazon Music (11.1%) and YouTube Music (9.7%) characterize the rest of the main Western DSP pack. Together with Spotify, these three DSPs characterize 65% of the worldwide market, however solely 59% of 2023 progress. Western DSPs are nonetheless the core of the market, however they’re collectively shedding share. However, even inside these 4, there’s a diverging image, with YouTube Music and Spotify gaining share in 2023 whereas Amazon and Apple misplaced share. Between Q3 2022 and Q3 2023, Spotify added extra subscribers than all three different main Western DSPs mixed

2023 was a robust 12 months for music subscriptions, delivering extra progress than maybe had been anticipated in such difficult macro-economic and geo-political circumstances. Even North America and Europe grew barely sooner in 2023 than in 2022. However, as commendable as squeezing extra progress out of in any other case mature markets is, the inescapable paradigm shift is the emergence of the World South as the expansion driver of tomorrow’s music subscriber base.

Need much more element? Try the complete music subscriber market shares report and knowledge set, with knowledge for greater than 20 DSPs throughout greater than 40 territories, with knowledge for each quarter from This autumn 2015 to Q3 2023.